Tony Lenzaro Brooks, who has spent all but nine months of his adult life behind bars, was sentenced Thursday to spend the rest of it in prison for a murder that the 29-year-old Little Rock man blamed on a mysterious, blood-spattered acquaintance.
Pulaski County jurors, after hearing Brooks' version of events, deliberated about two hours and 10 minutes before finding him guilty as charged with capital murder and abuse of corpse for the June 2013 death of Amy May Hughett. The life sentence was automatic for the capital murder conviction.
The charred remains of the 31-year-old woman were found in a tire fire behind an abandoned building in southwest Little Rock, seven weeks after Brooks had been paroled for an aggravated robbery conviction.
She had been strangled and fatally clubbed with an unknown object that left a diamond-shaped dent in the center of her forehead, among other wounds. Brooks was linked to her death through DNA that showed they had had sex sometime before she was killed.
In closing arguments, deputy prosecutor Amanda Fields told jurors that Hughett's injuries prove how Brooks deliberately killed her.
The burns that charred Hughett's body from the waist down were Brooks' attempt to destroy the DNA evidence, while marks on her neck showed how he needed two tries to strangle her, the prosecutor said.
"Tony Brooks ... knew what he was doing," she said. "With each strike and each blow Amy took, he knew what he was doing."
Hughett, an orphan who had no family or friends to attend the trial, is the second of two women Brooks is accused of killing over an eight-day period in June 2013. The bodies of both women had been set on fire after they died.
He is charged with first-degree murder, corpse abuse and arson in the slaying of 50-year-old Gloria Summage, who was stabbed 50 times and found inside her burning East Eighth Street home.
The nine women and three men of the jury were not told about Summage's death. But Brooks had to admit to the jury a 12-year history of convictions for aggravated robbery, escape, theft and fleeing when he chose, against the advice of his lawyers, to testify.
Before jurors were called to hear Brooks testify, the attorneys told Circuit Judge Herb Wright that they had advised him not to take the stand. They said they were not able to prepare for his defense because he had repeatedly refused to tell them what he planned to say to jurors.
Brooks, who spent 49 minutes on the witness stand, denied killing Hughett. He said he had unprotected sex with her the afternoon before her body was found.
A misguided attempt by his mother and younger sister to have him arrested in the hopes of saving him from enemies out to kill him made him a murder suspect, he told jurors.
Brooks told jurors that he had met Hughett a couple of weeks before she was killed at a drug house near his Eagle Drive residence.
The day they had sex, Brooks testified, Hughett had been dropped off by someone at that house, and she approached him on his front porch, where he was selling drugs.
"One thing led to another, and we go to my bedroom," he said, telling jurors he gave Hughett a $20 "rock" of crack cocaine for sex. But he said he never saw her again once she left his house.
"She left out the door. I shut the door," Brooks said.
He appeared to be reluctant to refer to the sexual encounter as prostitution.
"I call it giving what you want for getting what you need," he said.
He said he ran from the police later that night when the "jump-out boys" -- police narcotics officers -- surprised him and some friends who were hanging out.
"I ran because I had drugs," he said.
Brooks said he was driving his mother's white Jeep Grand Cherokee when he was flagged down by a friend, Milton Carter, and another man, Carl Miller, outside his home. The men asked him for a ride to the Westgate Apartments, Brooks said.
Miller, who got into the front passenger seat, had blood on his shirt, Brooks testified.
"I asked him, 'What's with that red stuff?'" Brooks told jurors, without saying whether he got an answer.
He said he barely knew Miller, but Carter was a longtime friend. He said he ended up sleeping at his grandmother's house after dropping the men off.
Carter could not be called as a defense witness because he was murdered at MacArthur Park about seven weeks later.
Brooks' mother told police that night that he had threatened to kill her and her boyfriend. Her story placed Brooks at the corner of Young and Geyer Springs roads -- a half-mile from where Hughett was killed -- about four hours before her body was found.
Challenged by deputy prosecutor Jeanna Sherrill about why his mother, Barbara Alexander, would come up with such an elaborate story, Brooks said Alexander, 47, made up the death-threat accusation to get him arrested because she feared for his safety and wanted him off the street.
His sister, Earlmesha Coleman, 20, supported their mother to police, also out of concern for him, Brooks said.
Alexander testified that she hoped to have Brooks hospitalized.
Both women lied to the jury about him, Brooks said, testifying that he told them to stick to the account they originally gave police because the judge and prosecutors had threatened to send them to prison if they changed their stories.
"What she said wasn't true," Brooks said of Coleman. "It was made up by my momma. I don't want to see my momma locked up, so I told her to come in here and stick to the story. My momma told my little sister to lie."
Brooks' attorney, Julia Jackson, said in her closing argument that Alexander is "a nut." Jackson said jurors saw for themselves when she testified that Alexander is a "very dysfunctional person."
"She wanted him in the hospital. What kind of nutty thing is that?" Jackson said.
Jackson said Brooks was the only one telling jurors the truth about what had happened, pointing out to all of the bad behavior he had described in trying to clear his name.
She showed jurors a photograph of a bloody condom wrapper that had been found in the victim's hair and said it had been left behind by the real killer.
"The person who used this condom killed Amy Hughett, and that person was Carlton Miller," Jackson said. "[Brooks] told it like it was. He wasn't holding back. He wasn't trying to hide anything."
Bloody marks found on the Jeep's passenger seat and door were from Miller, she said, telling jurors that the proof points to someone else killing Hughett.
"The big picture of evidence doesn't point to that [Brooks] killed her," she said. "It just says they had sex, and Tony admitted that."
The jury imposed an additional $10,000 fine on Brooks after hearing testimony about how he had flung feces and urine on three deputies, two of whom got the waste in their eyes and mouths. He also managed to lock two deputies into a jail cell before fighting officers who came to their rescue, the jury was told.
There's little chance that Brooks will have to pay the money. He has been ruled indigent by the court and has never spent more than three months outside of jail since the first time he came to the attention of the public when he was 17 years old in April 2003.
He had just turned 17 when he and three other teens crashed a car through the front gate of a juvenile detention facility in Saline County, court, jail and prison records show. The others were arrested by the end of the day, but Brooks wasn't apprehended until about two months later following a high-speed chase through North Little Rock.
Metro on 08/21/2015